My first association
when thinking about the topic of 'finding nothing' is an imaginary walk down
the cobblestones of Crosby or Greene Street in search of a Ray Johnson
performance, although this would be finding "A Nothing" as opposed to
finding nothing. I remember seeing a film of Johnson in a gallery throwing a
stack of papers into the air like a fountain, and then there's an image of him
dumping a box full of wooden spools down a staircase. The artist in motion, doing things in a gallery space or
studio, a living performing being, thinking of this reminds me of how truly
hard it is to create nothing, to be
silent in order to not speak of the
nothing of which one knows so very little. I once heard that Poincare's
definition of 'the possible' is that its value must be at least equal to one
over the age of the universe, which is currently set at 13.82 billion years, so
perhaps the chance of finding nothing is less than one in 13.82 billion. And
alongside this no-thing there is the non-event, or to stay in the realm of the
possible the 'least event' as conceived by John Latham, the smallest
constitutive element of the universe. In an excavation unit, this is what an
archaeologist looks for. In the studio practice, it is what an artist uses to
assemble into a something that
becomes undeniably present. A commonly related experience for artists is that
the peripheral, forgotten zones of the studio, the little nothings ("oh,
that's nothing") are, in the end, the pieces that get into the gallery.
The work at the center of the room, the unfortunate masterpiece endeavor is
over-worked and inevitably abandoned. Perhaps this is what Agnes Martin means
when she says that that saddest thing for an artist -- and perhaps for an
archaeologist -- is to have an idea.

What a gift
it is to search for -- let alone find -- nothing. It is a release from the
onerous legacy of treasure hunting or treasure making. To apprehend nothing is to somehow engage with
the formlessness from which all images, all forms are derived. I am reminded of
the field paintings of Ryman or Rothko evoking the source, like a reversal of
fate, where emptiness or the void becomes a source rather than a sink. Forms
emanate endlessly from nothing, and both painting and archaeological excavation
delineate this nothing through the curious custom of the frame, the cosmic map.

Even more fortuitous than finding nothing is
having nothing to find it with. Empty hands, empty pockets, no funding, no
tools, means having no purchase for any behavioral fulcrum to pry or leverage,
having nothing gives you the freedom to have your own thoughts. Excavation can
happen visually: looking for paint lines on the sides of buildings, changes in
materials, the air space between buildings, the vast negative spaces between
things, forms made explicit by Rachel Whiteread in her enormous casts of the
interior of rooms and houses.

The
hydra-headed discipline of archaeology has long contended with the mass noun,
the element, now reemerging in new garb as 'the hyperobject,' the spatial
distribution of similar types. The archaeological matrix, dancing between field
and form, shifting between horrore vacuee and horrore plentitudinous, is
ideally a space of abandonment, a no-place utopia where no one goes, where
nothing happens, a space of randomness and chaos. This is what connects archaeological
site practice to studio practice, they are both forms of personal expression,
and at least for me, both thrive only in spaces that have enjoyed as J.B.
Jackson has termed, an "interval of neglect," existing outside of day
to day norms and scrutiny. Nowhere -- in the middle of nothing -- is the place
where archaeologists willingly place themselves. Far more often than finding
nothing, archaeologists find themselves in the middle of nothing.

Finally,
nothing, as the absence of something, anything at all, has an absolute nature.
Nothing is -- as Rothko once observed of silence -- accurate. But this accuracy
of nothing is an accuracy that does not differentiate - it is encompassing and
accommodating. Like absence, nothing creates the open space for an affinity among
different forms of being, interchanges between different potentialities: what could
be, will be, might be, would be, was, could have been, but nothing is much
older than absence. In fact, nothing predates absence by at least 13.82 billion years. "Being is
said in many ways," according to Aristotle, and clearly, as its edges are
delineated by the trowel of the archaeologist or the palette knife of the
artist, so is nothing.